The best laid plans of mice and men…

Entries Tagged as 'Google Voice'

For many POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) is a distant memory… and given the pricing I’d say the local TelCo providers have priced it out of existence.

In a society where almost everyone has a cell phone (and unlimited cell service is fairly reasonably priced), the likelihood that any “home” telephone service will make a comeback is fairly low.

That said, Google Voice (a totally free service from Google) is something I’ve used for years to provide me with an auxiliary communications channel. Why would I want to give me cellular number to all the annoying people who get a phone number; I pay for my phone service, so I should be able to decide who can reach me when — and Google provides many of the features you simply must have for telecommunications in Google Voice.

You can easily access Google Voice directly from your Android handset, but sometimes you might want to be able to just pick a phone on the end table to answer or make a call; or you might have that occasional FAX you need to send (while I find it hard to believe that companies don’t allow you to upload scanned documents via a web page portal, or send them via email — many are still in the stone-age of technology and simply think FAX machines will be here until the end of time, or that some law makes a FAX somehow necessary, or that they’re more secure).

To that end, OBiTalk has a number of telecommunications devices (technically VoIP Telephone Adapters [TAs]) available for a fairly reasonably price, and they support Google Voice.

The OBi200, the lowest model currently sold, is a great and economical device to provide you with a “home” phone. The OBi200, a Google Voice number, and a home cordless (multi-station) phone is everything you need to have a service that fulfills you needs for free (if you require E911 service, you would have to subscribe to that service separately, but perhaps your cell phone is a better E911 device).

The Obi200 supports a single handset, but will support up to four phone lines (and any combination of them can be Google Voice — or other VoIP services… but again, Google Voice is free).

I’ve been using one of these devices for quite sometime, and I recently just added a second one (you can do station to station dialing with it as well), so it’s fairly easy to see that I’m quite happy with the device.

One word of advice, if you’re interested in a OBiTalk device, watch sales at online (also remember some brick-and-mortar stores will match online prices at some sites).

Just remember, with Google Voice, you do need to use each line (I recommend using them monthly at a minimum), but you will get an email notification from Google if you’re at risk of losing your Google Voice number from inactivity.